Edwin Van Der Sar's Retirement

The Man Who Changed The Game Of Soccer

In fact, his career was restarting. At United he won three straight league titles, and early one morning in Moscow in 2008, the invisible keeper finally became the hero. The Champions League final between United and Chelsea went to a penalty shootout. Van der Sar had a bad record in shootouts, and Chelsea had spotted his fatal flaw: On penalties, he dived too often to his right. Chelsea’s first six kickers shot to his left. He didn’t save a kick. In fact, by this point, he’d deserved to lose the shootout. However, John Terry’s famous slip saved United.

Then, after six penalties, van der Sar grasped what was happening. Just before Nicolas Anelka took Chelsea’s seventh, the keeper pointed to his own left. (Here, prose as a medium fails. I urge you to watch the shootout on YouTube.) “That’s where you’re all putting it,” he was saying. Anelka froze: He’d been found out. Terrified, he patted a gentle shot to the keeper’s right. Van der Sar, smiling as he dived, stopped it. "That one, all-decisive save is yet to come," he had said years before. Here it was.

In these final years, van der Sar has kept expecting to decay. Surely his eyesight must be going? It wasn’t. "Everybody doubts themselves," he said recently. "Every writer doubts themselves, every artist doubts himself and every football player does. That is what certain players thrive on.”

Going out on top

By peaking so late, he has helped change the conventional wisdom about goalkeepers' careers. Soccer’s ideal is old heads on young legs, but that’s particularly true for keepers. Joop Hiele, van der Sar’s former keeping coach, once explained: "Goalkeeping is registering the situation, recognizing it and finding the solution. The more often you do it, the easier it gets." An older keeper decodes the structure of attacks so quickly that he has time to organize his defense. Younger keepers can’t. They have only their talent. And when they make mistakes, they start doubting themselves. That’s what happened to United’s American, Tim Howard, the club’s last failed keeper before the Dutchman.

Van der Sar might have continued for even longer but for his wife’s brain hemorrhage in 2009. She has recovered well but needs regular treatment in the Netherlands. Asked when he decided to quit, he said: "Let's just say that it was playing on my mind from the moment Annemarie had her stroke." He’s now planning a stint as house-husband — preferably after pocketing the double of league title and Champions League.

Anyway, he couldn’t go on forever (could he?). "He made the point himself. It is pointless trying to be Superman into your forties," reports Ferguson. Under the showers at work one day, Wayne Rooney lobbied the keeper to continue, but to no avail. It was left to another teammate, Rio Ferdinand, to deliver the encomium. "He’s changed my thinking when it comes to goalkeepers,” said the center-back. “If I ever become a manager, I’ll be looking for my goalkeeper to exhibit as many of Edwin’s traits as possible." And so says everyone in soccer.

Simon Kuper is a columnist with the Financial Times. His new book The Football Men is published by Simon & Schuster in the UK this month.